Fox closes $22 billion Roku acquisition months ahead of 2027 target

The close and the terms

Roku stockholders received $95.30 in cash and 0.9799 Fox Class A shares for each share they held before closing. Fox stockholders own about 74% of the outstanding shares of Fox common stock. Former Roku stockholders own about 26%.

Anthony Wood founded Roku in 2002. He joins the Fox board and becomes co-chair of Fox Digital Platforms. That new division houses Roku, Tubi, Fox One and Red Seat Ventures. Paul Cheesbrough is co-chair and chief executive of that division. It also holds Fox's other digital products and services. Wood cast the move as continuity rather than a change of direction. "We started Roku more than two decades ago to give people a better way to watch TV, and that mission doesn't change today," he said in a statement. "What does change is our reach and resources. FOX has a deep respect for Roku's culture and wholly shares our commitment to staying open to every content partner."

Lachlan Murdoch is Fox's chief executive. He said the close "advances the long-term strategy of FOX". He said the combined company's top priority is to keep "the openness and choice that is the essence of the Roku platform".

Fox announced the deal in June. It had guided to a close in the first half of 2027. It got there in less than five months.

Why the scale matters

Roku reaches more than 100 million households globally. Most of them are in the U.S. Fox has owned Tubi since 2020. Tubi reported 110 million monthly active users.

Together the two accounted for 4.8% of streaming viewership in August. They tied with Disney and trailed Netflix and YouTube, according to Nielsen data. Add linear television and the combined company took 8.5% of total TV viewership that month. It ranked fourth behind YouTube, Skydance and Disney. Fox says the combined business ranks third in US television by share of viewing. The Nielsen figure, for August, puts it fourth.

For Fox, the appeal is direct access to that audience. Fox expects to use that access to sharpen advertising targeting and cut its reliance on traditional TV distribution, TechCrunch reported.

For Roku users, what changes on the home screen matters. Fox says Roku will remain "a leading open ecosystem for the broader streaming industry". Gizmodo reported concerns that Fox could give its own programming, Fox News included, preferential placement there. Engadget wrote that the worry is less about what services Fox removes than about what gets promoted on the home screen.

Fox's commitments

The DOJ cleared the deal after issuing a second request for information. In its conclusion, the department said entry by free, ad-supported streaming providers would "be timely, likely, and sufficient to make a substantial risk of harm to competition unlikely". It also reasoned that the merged firm would suffer "monetary and reputational harm" if it tried to use Roku against Fox's content rivals. It gave consumers switching to other connected TV platforms as one example.

Fox's commitments run for at least three years from closing. It will keep carrying non-Fox content on Roku. It will not discriminate against non-Fox content in search results. It will let users reconfigure app placement on the home screen. It also agreed to supply data products to third parties on commercially reasonable terms. It will maintain firewalls around competitively sensitive non-Fox data, including click, search, view and voice data.

The business Fox is buying

Roku's most recent quarter showed adjusted EBITDA of $248.8 million, up 113% year over year. Platform revenue was $1.3 billion, up 23%. In a shareholder letter, Wood and Roku finance chief Dan Jedda called the acquisition "an extraordinary opportunity" to "scale faster and innovate more aggressively".

Fox has aired marquee sporting events live on Tubi. The service streamed Super Bowl LIX in February 2025. It said it drew an average minute audience of 13.6 million viewers. It is set to air the upcoming Thanksgiving Day matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys. Whether Fox does anything similar with Roku, which runs its own FAST channel, is not known.

Cost savings are the other half of the case. Fox expects roughly $400 million in annual synergies within two years. Fox expects the deal to be accretive to free cash flow per share by the second full year after closing.

What happens next

Deadline reported that questions remain about how Fox will structure executive teams in advertising, product and other areas. It named Charlie Collier, president of Roku Media since 2022, as an executive who could factor into the combination. Tubi has run as a San Francisco-based group with a degree of autonomy since Fox bought it in 2020. Fox has not said it will repeat that model.

The conduct commitments expire after three years. No regulator has said whether it will extend them. The synergy target has a two-year window.